Yes, Dana Loesch Still Owes Seven Corrections

Yesterday, I wrote a post titled "Seven Corrections Dana Loesch Needs to Make Before She Can Talk About Journalism (with a straight face)" in response to Loesch's personal attacks against Karoli at the blog Crooks and Liars. Well, Loesch responded in her typical fashion today. Namely, she:

Was too scared to link to the original post.

Attacked Eric Boehlert at Media Matters rather than addressing my claims directly, even though Boehlert's post doesn't even talk about the Gladney case and his tweet linked to my article. Obviously Boehlert is a more high-profile target than I am (witness Breitbart's strange obsession with him), but Loesch should have some decency and actually address the source article rather than trying to promote her career.

She responds to only one out the seven points, and then offers up excuses why she doesn't need to correct her other blatant falsehoods.

She doesn't actually justify her claim even on the one issue she addresses, as will be shown below.

Dana Loesch's response was to focus on this claim from my post:

1. The closest example to the case of Karoli (which the right-wing called a "smear job" even though it was clearly a unintentional mistake) is Loesch's false smears against St. Louis County Counselor Patricia Reddington. Loesch claimed on Breitbart's Big Government site that Reddington filed charges in the Gladney/McCowan dispute without looking at Gladney's medical records (which would indicate serious negligence on Reddington's part). This is false. The records had been included with the police report, as is standard practice. In fact, a fellow Tea Partier visited Reddington's office and got the same account. Yet Dana Loesch has never corrected her story. She owes Patricia Reddington an apology and owes all of us a correction.

Loesch, relying on a post by Jim Durbin at 24thstate, now admits that Reddington did look at the medical records from Gladney's visit to the emergency room. But she claims that Reddington didn't look at additional medical records, which Durbin supports by presenting a letter from St. John's Mercy Medical Center that says, "To my knowledge, St. John's Mercy Medical Center as of November 30, 2009 has not recieved a request for medical records on patient: Gladney, Kenneth...from anyone other than the patient himself" [emphasis mine]. It's worth noting right off the bat that "To my knowledge" is a hedge phrase that leaves open the possibility that the records had been requested. In other words, all the letter says is that the person didn't know of anyone else requesting the records. But even if we accept that additional medical records had not been requested on November 30, would that make Loesch's claim true?

No, because Loesch said the following:

County Prosecutors Downgrade Charges without Checking Medical Record in Gladney Case

and

It has been discovered that no one from Patricia Redington’s office ever accessed Gladney’s medical records for use in determining the charges filed in the case.

Loesch claimed that Reddington's office never looked at the medical records. But Reddington did look at medical records. A little Logic 101 for the tea partiers: if the statement "Patricia Reddington looked at the medical records." is true, then the statement, "Patricia Reddington did not look at the medical records" has to be false. Pretty simple. Therefore, Loesch's claim was false, and she still needs to correct her story if she seriously considers herself a journalist.

Now, if Loesch had said Reddington didn't check the full records, then what she said might be true. Unfortunately for her, that's not what she said. But this is Dana Loesch we're talking about, so naturally she tries in her current post to present it as if she said that. Check out the amazingly cynical slight of hand in this screenshot of her post:


Loesch starts by saying, "I wrote this in December of last year" then quotes herself. She then writes, "Continuing:" and quotes herself again. But then she writes, "Again:" followed by this quote:

Thus prior to the charges being brought, Redington’s office couldn’t check the full medical records. They didn’t know of the existence of the full medical record.

This makes it seems as if the quote about the "full medical records" came from Loesch. But it didn't. In fact, that quote was from Jim Durbin's blog, despite Loesch's misleading presentation of the matter. To make it even more misleading, after presenting Durbin's quote, Loesch then starts the next paragraph with:

From 24thState, who also has signed documentation from the hospital:

Her series of | I wrote this in December of last year...| Continuing,...| Again... | and then | From 24thState... | implies that only the material after the last phrase was from 24thstate, but not the material before, reinforcing the false impression that Loesch herself referred to the "full medical records" in her previous writing. But she never did. Epic. Friggin. Fail.

Also damning to Loesch's ridiculous arguments is the fact that Durbin himself admits there should have been a correction! From Durbin's post:

The existence of a second pair of medical records, as well as additional testimony from eyewitnesses on their dealings with Pat Redington's office was the reason I decided not to publish a correction about the emergency room records being in the reviewing prosecutor's hands.

And later:

So we'll call it three and a half correct accusations by Dana, and one that could have been worded better, but couldn't be defended without tipping off SEIU to information that I chose to not reveal. I provided that information to Dana, and so any fault is mine - but a correction could not be provided until now.

Earlier in his post, he provides a fuller explanation for withholding the info:

And it's also fair to say that I haven't published everything, precisely because SEIU's blatant lies about that night have led them to twist information, selectively present recorded video, and twist the testimony of eyewitnesses into some fictional account of Elston McCowan being the victim, with Perry Molens being an innocent bystander...What I knew is that publishing the information I had would make it easy for SEIU to concoct yet another version of the beating of Kenneth Gladney.

In other words, Jim Durbin is admitting that he knew that the information that he and Dana Loesch had put out in November was false yet he withheld information for 5 months because he was worried that it would help SEIU "concoct" another story. And this is what Dana Loesch is trying to spin as victory over Media Matters. Uh... wow.

So anyway, yes, Dana Loesch still owes us all at least seven corrections before she can talk about journalism with a straight face. It's probably much more than that, but nobody has time to fact check all the falsehoods she puts out.